Specifically, the performance Wish You Weren’t Here was a public response to anti-Asian racism during the COVID-19 pandemic. Evoking East Meets West self-portrait series of Chinese American artist Tseng Kwong Chi, I playfully and politically occupied the role of the Other and the perpetual foreigner, posing as a tourist in front of these iconic Berlin places of interest in March of 2020, before the gravitas of the Coronavirus disease was felt in Germany. Dubbed the Kung flu by the president of the United States and right-wing media, it continued to be associated with yellow peril, while anti-Asian hate crimes increased across the United States and Europe.
 Thus, my wearing of a N95 mask in a city where many of its inhabitants seemed oblivious to the danger of infection was ostentatious; some laugh or stare uneasily, some even yell racist insults. My selfies in front of well-known landmarks seem silly with an additional peace sign, which became popular all-over East Asia in the 1980s; videos in the series deal more with the topic of xenophobia in an explicit manner. Both Turks and Jews, who have historically been seen as outsiders in Germany, play roles by their presence and absence in the backdrop of these video performances.

In the video Wish You Weren’t Here (And I Feel Fine), I silently wander through the entire Maybachufer open air market known as the famous Turkish Market in the Kreuzberg district, unresponsive to several verbal interactions. In one video, I am wearing a self-made mask out of linen and Korean hemp (sambe) stitched with my own hair which spells “THE OTHER.” Sambe is a traditional weaved hemp that has been used by the commoners for summer wear and framed as traditional Korean funeral clothing by a Japanese colonial gaze*. Thus, through multiple layers, this work deliberately calls out racist and orientalist essentialisms associated with historical and contemporary entanglements, from Japanese colonialism to the current pandemic associated with the Chinese.

*Korean hemp has only been associated with mourning and burial rituals since the Japanese colonial period when the colonial gaze framed sambe in this manner.

Exhibitions
The COVID-19 Diaries: The New Normal, curated by Grace Noh and Yichen Zhou, MiA Collective, New York/Beijing